The head of a nonprofit that manages the infrastructure of the Internet defended the US government's move to cede oversight of the body, and downplayed concerns that Russia, China or other countries could exert control and restrict the web's openness.

Last month the US government saw sense and realised that the world wide web really belonged to the world and said it would relinquish oversight of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). The United States has overseen the process but since 1998 has contracted it out to ICANN. Since then, the Department of Commerce has planned to phase out its stewardship and has taken many steps toward that. The US contract with ICANN will expire in September 2015, and last month the Commerce Department said it plans to formally turn the oversight capacity, which it says has become symbolic, over to a global multi-stakeholder mechanism that the ICANN community will propose. But the move has provoked a backlash among right wing conservatives who claim that it will give control to China or Russia, to use ICANN as a venue to push for more restrictive Internet governance policies.

ICANN's chief executive, Fadi Chehadé pointed out that while everyone is focused on these three, four countries the outfit will have 150 other countries involved. Fadi Chehadé, said the multi-stakeholder model is not so much for the few who do not believe in it, it should be to the great “middle mass that would like to see us stand by it and they will stand with us. This is the bet we need to make."

Assistant Secretary of Commerce Lawrence Strickling also defended the move at the House of Representatives' communications and technology subcommittee hearing.

"No one has yet to explain to me the mechanism by which any of these individual governments could somehow seize control of the Internet as a whole," Strickling said.

Louisiana Republican Representative Steve Scalise said: “Do you really think that Vladimir Putin ... can't figure out some way to get control? China and Russia can be very resourceful.”

Chehadé said that people will talk about capturing (control of ICANN), but they cannot. For 15 years ICANN has operated without one government or any government capturing the decision making and nothing has happened.

An international panel consisting of freeloaders of every nation, affectionately called governments, have jotted down more than 240 objections to proposed top level domains such as .wtf, .baby, and .islam.

Apparently, applicants have been given Early Warning notices, requesting further info or clarification, as well as suggesting withdrawal in some cases. Domains such as .finance, .dental, etc., have brought about warnings that applicants must have safeguards in place, to prevent potential misuse.

Domains on the lines of L'oreal's .skin and Johnson & Johnson's .baby have been flagged for anti-competitive potential. The companies have thus been asked to provide transparent criteria for access to these domains.

Domains .wtf, .fail and .sucks have been flagged for "overtly negative or critical connotation", which is too bad really because the world needs them now more than ever. The likes of .bible and .islam are being pondered due to their capability to represent larger communities they refer to and prevent abuses thereof.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has advised some applicants to withdraw applications, particularly in the cases such as .patagonia and .africa. According to current guidelines, countries and territories can only be registered with agreement of governments and authorities deemed relevant in the case.

Saudi Arabia is trying to stop the Vatican from getting new web addresses ending in .catholic. The Kingdom claims that the Pope “cannot demonstrate that it possesses a monopoly over the term ‘Catholic’”.

Saudi Communication and Information Technology Commission said in its complaint many other Christians use the term 'Catholic' to refer more broadly to the whole Christian Church, regardless of denominational affiliation. “Other Christian communions lay claim to the term "Catholic" such as the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Oriental Orthodox Church.”"Therefore, we respectfully request that ICANN not award this," the statement pointed out

But the Saudi Arabians were not stopping there. They sent 160 objections to ICANN's plans to allow hundreds of new “top-level domains” to supplement .com, .co.uk and other existing suffixes.

The Saudi government said that it objected to any group being put in charge of web addresses based on religious terms. It complained about bids to create top-level domains for .islam, .halal and .ummah on similar grounds.

While that all sounds fair enough, the Saudis also objected to .gay because it “will be offensive” to societies where homosexuality is “contrary to their culture, morality or religion”. They did not like .tattoo as tattooing is prohibited in Islam and Judaism and to .bar on grounds that because of its association with alcohol the term “promotes activities that can be detrimental to public order and morals”. Sir Richard Branson will have to fight objections from the Gulf if he wants to create .virgin, too.

Diffie is the VP of information security and cryptography at ICANN, who laid the foundation for the public key infrastructure which now helps secure the Internet. Diffie said that good guys can't exist without bad guys and the comment explains the rise of cybercriminals and groups such as Anonymous and LulzSec.

He said that one of the most important things for good cryptography and security in the age of the Internet is good code. Unfortunately, really good code is generally too expensive to write. He said that humanity is moving into a software age as we moved into an iron age.

This means that there needs to be a good plan to secure software. To do that a developer needs to know exactly what the purpose is of the application is going to be to make it more secure. They need to write good code when some of the current programming languages are vastly inaccurate. Some languages actually encourage buffer overflows, Diffie said.

Writing code is almost always a trade off. While in the 1970s it was thought possible to get full formal proof of the code, achieving that is not a realistic scenario, because of the cost involved. He said that all good code is expensive and more money should be spend on writing really good code so applications can become secure, he said.

Browser sandboxes are created to confine code but people need to realise that way of working is inadequate for a lot of applications.

The office of the president of the junta of French backed rebels who over threw their lawful government a few years ago has called for changes are needed to make the domain naming process more "accountable" and "transparent,”

Larry Strickling, a Commerce Department assistant secretary, said that the California nonprofit group, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, (ICANN) needed to do more to explain decisions and to listen to national governments.

ICANN and national governments have been at odds lately over the rules for approving new top-level domain names. Hundreds of applications for these suffixes are expected later this year, once the process has been finalized, including bids for .car, .love, .movie, .web, and .wine.

Governments feel that the bringing about of these domains prevent it collecting lots of money for listening to lobby groups. The Christian lobby is particularly vocal in the US and they are leaning on the government for a porn purge. They feel that setting up high-level domains will give kids a one-stop shop for porn. This increases the likelihood of born-again ministers running into their congregations when visiting adult sites.

The bloke behind Pirate Bay wants to set up an alternative to the domain name outfit ICANN.

Peter Sunde says that he has been suspicious of ICANN for a long time. ICANN is the non-profit corporation is tasked with managing both the IPv4 and IPv6 Internet Protocol address spaces as well as handling the management of top-level domain name space including the operation of root nameservers.

However Sunde said that he has lost a domain in the past and it was taken without any consultation. Instead the organisation relied on information from recording industry group IFPI to change the domain ownership.

He has put out a Tweet to create a competing root server - “Hello all #isp of the world. We’re going to add a new competing root-server since we’re tired of #ICANN. Please contact me to help.”

Sunde has a plan to create a DNS root server to begin with that uses peer-to-peer technology and is secure. While it will be quite basic, it will be open and secure.

Sunde might just be venting, but he has a habit of doing stuff. Pirate Bay was one such example.